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READERS NOTE something special the Great Mystery created to teach us. These people had something special to tell us." Russell Means When the first of the Old Stone Age people moved from east Africa into Europe and Asia, they fashioned tools and learned to talk as the progenitors of modern man. They were mainly of hunting stock. And so, as the mammoth and bison, which were their game, left Asia more than 35,000 years in the past, walking across the land bridge that is now underwater at the Bering Straight, Old Stone Age man followed. After all, they had to eat. Tracking the herds first across northern Alaska, they headed south along the Rocky Mountains and into the central grasslands of North America, and over the next 30,000 years these native people would come to range from the northern tip of the sub-Arctic to southern-most Argentina and as far west as the South Seas, including the Polynesian Islands. The rites and myths of the earliest periods of humankind, indeed the whole interpsychical memory of the cosmic history of space and time, thus went with them, including the animal archetype - "that point, principle, or aspect of the realm of essence from which the creatures of his species [sprang]." 1 Indeed, the creation and origin stories and the Trickster tales for almost the entire sphere of the native people of North America are set in a remote and prehuman mythical past. It is a time when the world was occupied by birds and animals having supernormal powers, much as in the fabled Aztlan. The Cree, a Canadian tribe that also hunted buffalo south, into the northern United States, are said to have received their spoken language from the animals. As the story goes, the Cree Trickster, WICHIKAPACHE, was born "out of" the animals, and is thus the first human being, or Original Man. We are talking of a collective memory of the evolution of the species, carrying as it does the magic of the Horned Gods and the ancient dancing "Sorcerer of Trois Freres." He can be traced through the descendents of the prehistoric Siberians and the horned shamans of Noord en Ooost Tartarye to the high-ranking totemic societies of the Blackfoot tribe of the northern plains, and beyond. These sorcerers, with horns on their heads and robes upon their backs, danced the magico-religious rites and were the regulators of life. The North American tribes were also greatly influenced by both the high civilizations of Stone Age China and Middle America, themselves having traveled by a different route from their origins in east Africa. Among the unaggressive Zuni people of the present-day southwest United States, the human representative of the gods is the memory bank of all such "beginning talk." And so we hear not only of the great migrations in the cycles of their stories, but also echoes of the Mesopotamian Horned God cults and their journey to the land of the dead, such as when the Zuni Kiaklo descends to a comparable "Lake of the Dead" where he is instructed to maintain the stories of creation itself. For the Zuni, the two-sexed creator god existed before all else: "by his-her volition did he-she create life." 2 The Zuni myths of origin also tell of the role of the supernatural ihaman, or Two-Spirit being, which is responsible for restoring and maintaining balance. The ihaman epitomizes the two-sexed creator and hermaphroditic gods, which here as elsewhere, from ancient Egypt to the pre-Columbian Americas, are connected with birth, self-perpetuation, and rejuvenation. With the Zuni's neighbors, the Navajo, their creation myths, too, suggest that the very survival of humanity is dependent upon the creativity of Two-Spirit people. The native North Americans view nature with an eye to the spirit alive in all things. Everything - and everyone - that exists has a purpose. The Hopis of northeast Arizona believe that each person is given a particular gift at birth by the Creator, and it is one's mission in life to bring that gift into being in his or her lifetime; that it is absolutely essential to do so in order to make the universe whole and complete. The Navajo call it living in beauty. In the eyes of the Creator each person's gift is equally important. The gift of the Two-Spirit people is that they possess both a male and a female spirit, constituting a third gender. With "the original unity of humans, their differentiation into separate genders, and the potential for reunification as well," Among the Pawnee of the North American Plains, the story is told in which a young boy is made pregnant as a result of a magic spell. In explaining the confusion of sex in the Pawnee boy, Claude Levi-Straus echoed the very same distinction made by Carl Jung of the "incomplete detachment" from the archetype of Original Man. Levi-Strauss called it an "opposition to differentiation." He added that "all of Pawnee metaphysical thought is actually based on the idea that at the creation of the world antagonistic elements were intermingled, [leaving the pregnant boy with] the male and female principles co-existent in him." 4 The original Algonquins, who once lived in a single village in Canada where the city of Ottawa now stands, are now the largest group of tribes speaking similar languages, ranging along the eastern seaboard of North America and inland to the prairies. It was the Algonquin-speaking natives with whom the first European colonists made contact in the 16th century. The Algonquin tribes as a whole, including the Pawnee, and in common with most native people of North America, believed that human contact with "the unseen powers" came through these specially selected individuals. They might experience visions, show homosexual tendencies, dress in women's clothes, and go away alone for long periods, but in the native culture they were thought to be closer to the spirit world than ordinary man. And with varying degrees of emphasis, the Two-Spirit natives each had their own specialized branch of this magic, be they called prophet, wizard, artist, shaman, or leader of the chants. The Chukchi of the Alaskan Bering Straight region turned to their Two-Spirit brothers, the yirka-la ul, for their unparalleled ability to heal. As the most powerful shamans of the tribe, they were respected for their spiritual or psychic powers. In the Yuman-Pinan area of California, which also crosses over into Arizona, the wiik'ovat was the name given to the Pima's Two-Spirit member of the tribe. He was noted for his visionary power and dreaming. Among the Papagos, ranging from Arizona to northwest Mexico, these Two-Spirit qualities are accepted as a powerful gift of the supernatural world. The Yuma’s, too, believed their Two-Spirit elaxa was stirred from the depths by the Creator who spoke to the elaxa in his dreams as a means to transforming the mind. In the historic pattern of these people, 182 of the native tribes spread throughout the whole of North America recognized the Two-Spirit individual, and in at least 168 of their languages still spoken in the United States today the terms for Two-Spirit people continue to be found. "Such individuals were present from the earliest eras of human experience, and their presence was never questioned. They were part of the natural order of the universe, with a special contribution to make." 5 Among the Assiniboine and Lakota of the plains states round South Dakota, the Two-Spirit winkte, is described as wakan, a term that means very sacred or holy and is incorporated in the name for the Great Holiness itself: wakanda or Wakan Tanka. Thus, as the physicists understand energy and matter in E=mc2, as the Greeks revered the "world eye" of the gay god APOLLO, and as the two-sexed SHIVA dances the dance of universal consciousness, the Siouan people understand the Two-Spirit winkte as a conduit for the same infinite life force which is the source of their spiritual power. For the Oglala Sioux, winkte is also the medicine man or shaman, a call rising from the very depths of not only the cultural sphere of his people, and not only of the psychological root of every person in his tribe, but "the ultimate sanctuary and wellspring of the whole world and wonder - all the magic - of the gods." 6 Shamans are not always Two-Spirit people, and the distinction between the two can be carried further to one of a powerful wizard capable of calling in the energy of all things to that of a more priestly role as a mediator, leader of the rituals, or speaker of truths. Yet, as Levi-Strauss noted, the theme of the Two-Spirit boy in the mythology of the Pawnee was, in part, an account of the origin of shamanistic power. It is an ability which entails a focused channeling of consciousness, like Mickey the sorcerer’s apprentice, dipping deep into the waters of the collective well, to stimulate very real forces. Harnessing these forces, which are at bottom the impressions of all of life, is a means to activate the movement of energy, the literal working of mind over matter. It is the principle that underlies shamanic magic. Clyde Hall of the Shoshone tribe of the Plains points out that in his personal experience, and through his studies, he has never come across a shaman who wasn't gay, or at least bisexual. "You have to have that," he says. Among the Algonquin medicine people, doing the dance of "The Flyer," they acted out a ritual based on the cultural myth of the bird, carrying messages between Earth and the world of spirits. Embodying the fullest sense of the sorcerer's magic of mediated altered states, "The Flyer," in trance, becomes the bird that rises from Earth, as consciousness once did from the fishes of the waters before humankind was born, rising higher and higher to the world of spirit - manitous for the Algonquin - from which "The Flyer" returns bearing messages to his people. It is equivalent to entering into PLATO's Idea of the species, wherein "all things [are found] in all." "For where shamanism is involved, the mythological age and realm are here and now: the man or woman, animal, tree, or rock possessing shamanistic magic has immediate access to that background of dreamlike reality which for most others is crusted over." 8 Speaking the language of the birds, the FAIRIES thus lived in the American world, too. "In the Yucatan the god Chin is said to have established sacred homosexuality and a gay priesthood serving in the temples, just as was true of the temples in ancient Babylon and Sumeria." 9 Even, today, though it is usually denied or hidden, it is conservatively estimated, for example, that upwards of 30-40% of the church's administration and clergy remain similarly homosexual. For the Yaqui of Northern Mexico, the Two-Spirit’s ability to dream was highly valued. One Yaqui's name itself, First Star, identifies him as the bringer of light - when time was first encountered and from that encounter, light and matter came to be known. First Star's illumination is the realization of divinity, the powers of the forces of life, and he plugs into this current, "[dreaming] for others, spiritually healing and sorting out a person's confusion." 10 The Two-Spirit ira'muxe of the Zapotec people of Oazaca, Mexico, were considered a creation of god and were "believed to be the brightest, most gifted children." 11 Among the Chilean Araucanians, just like the Algonquin "Flyer," they were the divining priests with the power to transform themselves into magical birds aflight. Roused from the depths of their myths, visions and dreams, the social function of the Two-Spirit native people was thus to not only serve as a mediator between the sexes, but to walk in both worlds as a bridge between man and the powers that lay behind the veil of the otherwise ordinary life. They were keepers of the knowledge of the elders, and they demonstrated their facility with the sort of "magic" which finds its parallel in every race of every age. They assisted tribal members undergoing a life crisis and provided counsel and assistance through the transformative power of dreams. As clairvoyants, as hypnotists, or in their exercising of the ability to channel energy, such as with the laying on of hands, they were the healers and the teachers. Two-Spirit native people, like the western world's pagan witches, were the repositories of herbal wisdom, too, and, like the Pied Pipers of yet another land, they were the most gifted in taking care of children. And they were the artists, ever the artists, a calling which for most tribal people was rightly understood as dipping into a fountain from the wellspring of all of life. The beauty and strength of native art - both highly symbolic and abstract - was developed to such an advanced stage that it is characteristically on par with the masters of modern art. Indeed, ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Arthur Dove, MORRIS GRAVES, Georgia O'Keefe, MARSDEN HARTLEY and others were to find inspiration here. Tane was the name given by the pre-Christian Polynesians to the supreme fountainhead from whom the "water of life" flowed. He protected the birds and forests and molded the first two-sexed beings out of red clay. Interestingly enough, the root of the western name "Adam," the biblical Original Man, means "red dirt." As the "living water," Tane was the essence of spirit itself - mana to the Polynesians - the energy of the heavens coursing in his breath and pervading all of space as the essential principle of life. Thus, the ancient Hawaiian creation chants poetically refer to Tane as "Our Father in heaven who issued the vine that cascaded unto this earth upon which his offspring bloomed like lovely flowers, unfurling their petals toward the sun." In "The Two Sorcerers" of Polynesian mythology, which is as varied and rich as the mythologies of India or those of the classical Greeks, the mahu was skilled in magic. In their dialect maori, mahu means "to heal." In mangaian, "mau" means "to be healed," and among the Samoan, who themselves recognize the Two-Spirit fa'fa'hini, "mafu" can be either or simultaneously both "to heal a wound" or "a male homosexual." 13 The wound referred to here, as it is in the psycho-spiritual explanations, is the cosmic separation of heaven (spirit) from (matter) earth. In Tahiti today, the mahu organize cross-dressing beauty contests for charity, similar to the modern day American Imperial Courts, competing for the seemingly incongruous title of Miss Tane or Miss Male. In another time, however, they were accorded special roles in traditional religious rites. Dominating the tahiku dance, an ancient form of the hula, the mahu mediated spirituality, using the dance as a means to activate the body, just as the dancing Horned Gods did, as a vehicle to manifest the spiritual and occult energies of the unconscious, or the unity found among all of life. Then came the Christians who began to rip the flowers off the vine. The mahu's subtle, graceful hand gestures and the undulating, sensuous movements of the hula offended the missionaries, and so it had to be oppressed. The mahu got off easy. Six-thousand miles to the east of Hawaii, and separated by hundreds of years in time, the spiritual thirst of the Catholic conquistadors was being quenched by the natives' bedazzling golden riches. And in thespirit of their own peculiar interpretation of heavenly grace, these representatives of the so-called holy church burned and butchered the Two-Spirits wherever they found them alive. Among the Seminole tribe of the southeast United States, where the Two-Spirit natives fed and ministered to the ill, they were set upon by the conquerors' slavering dogs that ripped them limb-from-limb. The Europeans called the Two-Spirit people "sodomites" and named them the berdache, a term which, like the contemporary and equally simplistic reductions of a people to a label for who does what with whom in bed, traces back to the mid-east bardaj, which means a man's lover. Yet just as same-sex attractions travel betwixt and between, so, too, does the etiology of language which, for berdache in its root form, also trails to another word called GANYMEDE. While homosexual in its connotation of emotional and sexual passion, GANYMEDE also carries the significance of rapture, itself a religious term. And so like GANYMEDE, who was for the classical Greeks the same-sex male lover of the divine light, ZEUS, berdache as a term for the Two-Spirit people carries gaiety once again cross space and time. End FOOTNOTES: Full Citations Two-Spirit Native People
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